I was all ready with my thesis as to why there are no blogs in Europe, why nobody here even knows what a blog is, when I decided I should perhaps search for the odd French or Italian blog just to prove my point. I now regret this bout of empiricism. A day’s worth of euroblogging later, my theories lie in shambles.

I will now have to write about why the Anglophone world doesn’t know about European blogs. But because I am my own worst editor, and this is my blog, you first get to read all about my reasons why there are no blogs in Europe. I’ll be brief…

Languages used to access Google.
Source: Google Zeitgeist.Language: English is the lingua franca of the current age, English is understood by far more people than other European languages, including Spanish or Portuguese. This makes writing in English potentially much more rewarding than any other language. Is this kind of network effect not a disincentive to blogging in French?

We think Europeans don’t blog because we don’t read their blogs. We can’t read their blogs. It’s the language barrier, stupid. Yet blogging is done by educated elites and schoolkids on both sides of the Atlantic — and not by anybody else. There are fewer blogs in all of West Virginia than in the West Village; this I am sure of. Much as we wish it to be true, blogging is not as ubiquitous as TV, neither in the US nor in Europe. We build blogs, but only other bloggers come.

I start my tour with the Francophone equivalent of the Bloggies: Les Blogs d’Or. The cynic in me immediately hones in on the categories. Best Belgian blog? But only if it’s in French? Potverdekke. No chance of blog@stefangeens.com competing. I delve into the current event blogs category. The quality is very high, but I am eventually reminded of I first read this essay in his book Mortal Questions. Gist: No amount of reductionist gymnastics is really ever going to really let us know “the subjective character of experience” of being a bat. Why a bat? Any animal will do, but bats have sonar, and Nagel hammers home his point by asking you if you can really know what it is like to be that animal if you cannot even perceive the world as it does.

Thomas Nagel’s famous essay, What is it like to be a bat? These blogs have a different taste, a different feel, one that i suspect would not survive translation. And then it occurs to me that the entirety of Anglophone blogs have a different such subjective character of experience too.

This is the best I can do to explain: A language’s blogs collectively tend to have similar assumptions about what the reader brings to the blog, and these assumptions in turn are distinct from those of blogs in other languages. Francophones seem more able to widthstand long, navel gazing neo-Baudelarian rants Francophone blogs also have a penchant for really small text. Maybe it’s because they have low res monitors still…by authors who have themselves photographed smoking cigarettes. Italians are more pragmatic; and their posts tend to be far shorter, and more concerned with media personalities than anything else.

But in one way Italian blogs are much more accessible. Italian blogs do a far better job of linking to familiar Anglophone sites in addition to their homegrown offerings, Before you bash the French, tell me how many links to French blogs your site has.while the French seem to be more autonomous in their linking.

I think I will go survey Swedish blogs next. An early entrant, a runner-up in the Bloggies no less, is How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons.

I would love to hear of any favorite non-English blogs you frequently read.